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European Infrastructure for Plant Phenotyping
VIB Agro-Incubator
Kerrebroek 66b
9850 Nevele
Belgium
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EMPHASIS builds skills and capacity across Europe to strengthen the use and impact of plant phenotyping in research, innovation, and practice. Our education and training activities reach researchers, technicians, students, and industry professionals—supporting learning at every level, from foundational knowledge to advanced technical expertise.
Training opportunities range from short courses, workshops, and summer schools to hands-on placements and peer-learning exchanges. Topics cover experimental design, sensor use, data handling, and image analysis, alongside approaches for affordable and scalable phenotyping that can be applied in local laboratories, field settings, or industry contexts.
EMPHASIS also works to broaden awareness and uptake of plant phenotyping by connecting disciplines and communities. Through collaboration with universities, research infrastructures, and industry, we promote shared learning resources and help embed phenotyping methods within wider research and innovation systems—fostering a skilled, informed, and connected community driving sustainable plant science in Europe.
EMPHASIS holds a trusted, neutral position in the European research and innovation ecosystem—making it uniquely suited to convene diverse voices spanning academia, industry, policy, and funding. We bring together stakeholders through forums, workshops, and strategic dialogues to help define phenotyping roadmaps, identify emerging needs, and align research, investment, and policy agendas.
EMPHASIS fosters collaboration across disciplines and sectors, creating opportunities for shared problem-solving, community building, and the co-design of future research directions. We work with national and European associations, investor networks, and policymakers to represent community perspectives and feed these into evidence-based decision-making and strategic planning.
By acting as a broker and connector, EMPHASIS helps build consensus, catalyse partnerships, and raise the visibility of plant phenotyping in European science and innovation. The outcome: stronger alignment between research, technology, and practice—and a more coordinated approach to sustainable agriculture and the plant-based bioeconomy.
EMPHASIS promotes the effective management, sharing, and reuse of plant phenotyping data across Europe. By developing guidance, tools, and training, EMPHASIS helps researchers and service providers adopt FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles—ensuring that results generated in one location can be discovered and built upon elsewhere.
Our activities support the harmonisation of data workflows, metadata standards, and quality assurance procedures across installations, strengthening the comparability and long-term value of phenotyping datasets. EMPHASIS also facilitates secure data storage, access to trusted repositories, and the development of tools for data visualisation and integration, promoting transparency and reproducibility.
By ensuring data are well structured, interoperable, and modelling-ready, EMPHASIS helps bridge experimental and computational research. Through partnerships with national and European digital infrastructures, including the European Open Science Cloud, EMPHASIS contributes to a connected data ecosystem that enhances collaboration, innovation, and the generation of new insights for sustainable agriculture and plant science.
EMPHASIS advances phenotyping science by identifying, testing, and promoting cutting-edge tools, sensors, and methods across controlled, field, and data environments. Through collaboration among researchers, technologists, and industry partners, EMPHASIS helps bring innovative approaches from concept to practice—enhancing precision, scalability, and interoperability across installations.
Our activities include horizon scanning to identify emerging opportunities, piloting and validating next-generation technologies, and promoting harmonised standards and calibration protocols to ensure data comparability. We foster adoption of proven methods across national infrastructures and disciplines, supporting the evolution of best practices that keep Europe at the forefront of plant phenotyping innovation.
By translating user needs into technical solutions and offering training on novel approaches, EMPHASIS helps the community stay ahead of technological change. This coordinated effort strengthens research quality, facilitates reproducibility, and broadens access to new tools—empowering users to tackle complex biological questions and drive the sustainable transformation of plant-based systems.
EMPHASIS works with industry, agritech companies, breeders, and start-ups to accelerate innovation through access to advanced phenotyping facilities, data, and expertise. We offer tailored experimental services, technology validation, upskilling and collaborative R&D opportunities that help translate scientific discovery into practical, market-ready solutions.
Industry can engage with EMPHASIS through requests for access to our installations, being supported to identify the right infrastructure and design effective experiments or pilots.
Beyond access, EMPHASIS serves as a platform for dialogue between industry and the research community—convening discussions on future phenotyping needs, technology roadmaps, and emerging challenges. Through workshops, hackathons, and innovation sprints, we bring together science and enterprise to bridge current problems with future solutions.
At the policy level, EMPHASIS engages with peak industry bodies and professional associations to understand sector needs and feed these into our strategy and advocacy with policymakers and funders. In doing so, EMPHASIS strengthens the connection between research, innovation, and application—fostering a shared vision for sustainable, plant-based solutions across Europe.
User Access is central to EMPHASIS’s mission to make advanced plant phenotyping facilities and expertise available to researchers and innovators across Europe. EMPHASIS supports access to installations operating in controlled environments, intensive and lean field sites, and data services — enabling investigations that range from precision experiments to multi-site field studies.
Access is offered through several routes: on-demand access, available year-round based on facility capacity; and competitive access calls, which are periodically opened to support specific research priorities, technologies, or crops. These access calls allow scientists from academia, industry, and the public sector to propose experiments, with selection based on scientific quality, feasibility, and relevance.
Whether through a central brokerage service or through direct engagement with our national facilities, EMPHASIS ensures that users can identify the right infrastructure for their needs. Support is provided for experimental planning, logistics, and data management, with clear guidance on cost models and access procedures. By promoting transparent, high-quality access, EMPHASIS helps researchers generate robust, reproducible results and accelerates innovation in plant science and sustainable agriculture.
Digital infrastructure that ensures plant phenotyping data are FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — so research outputs remain discoverable and valuable over time. EMPHASIS supports harmonised data management across installations, aligning metadata, workflows, and quality standards to improve interoperability and scientific reproducibility.
Services under development include user-friendly repositories, dataset-finder tools, and support for data visualisation, modelling, and simulation — extending experimental results across time, space, and environmental scenarios. Training and self-evaluation resources help installations improve data maturity and adopt best practices for long-term data stewardship.
By connecting with European digital infrastructures such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and related research initiatives, EMPHASIS ensures that data generated across the infrastructure can be shared, reused, and built upon, strengthening collaboration and innovation across the European Research Area.
Network of multi-environment trial sites with lean, efficient phenotyping
Field phenotyping under real agricultural and breeding conditions, using portable or lightweight equipment to assess hundreds to thousands of plots across diverse environments. These trials capture genetic and phenotypic variation in response to management, soil, and climate differences, providing insight into how crops perform in realistic production systems.
Environmental monitoring typically includes sensor networks measuring temperature, radiation, rainfall, humidity, and soil water potential at hourly or finer resolution, mirroring data standards used in intensive field sites. Mobile or drone-based platforms deploy imaging and sensing tools (RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal) for efficient, repeatable data collection.
A key EMPHASIS goal is to expand and coordinate networks of such field trials across Europe — enhancing geographical and climatic coverage and integrating datasets to analyse crop performance across gradients and scales. These efforts bring together biologists, geneticists, agronomists, breeders, modellers, and data specialists in a shared research framework.
Smart/ Intensive field experimental sites for high throughput phenomics
Highly instrumented field sites that maintain natural light and climate regimes, enabling detailed study of hundreds of micro-plots through frequent, non-invasive measurements. These platforms combine plant performance monitoring with environmental sensing (soil moisture, temperature, radiation, soil chemistry) to capture growth dynamics and genotype–environment interactions over time. Mobile or gantry-mounted sensors (RGB, multispectral/hyperspectral, LiDAR, thermal) and drone-based imaging record trait responses with high temporal resolution.
Some installations, known as semi-controlled field sites, can manipulate key environmental factors to simulate future climatic scenarios — for example, using rainout shelters to induce drought or FACE systems to elevate CO₂. With ‘deep phenotyping’ options utilising even more sensors or destructive sampling, these installations support experiments designed to decipher complex traits in settings that reflect real agricultural conditions.
High-throughput phenotyping in greenhouses and growth chambers with tightly controlled environments.
These platforms let researchers test trait variation under defined abiotic/biotic conditions (e.g., light, temperature, humidity, CO₂, soil water/nutrients) and simulate stress scenarios with high repeatability. Automation either moves plants past fixed stations (weighing/watering and imaging) or brings sensors to stationary plants.
Typical sensing suites include RGB, multispectral/hyperspectral, thermal, and chlorophyll-fluorescence imaging, often paired with gravimetric watering and gas-exchange to derive growth, water-use, and stress metrics. Throughput commonly spans hundreds to thousands of plants, while ‘deep phenotyping’ setups trade throughput (tens to hundreds) for finer physiological resolution at minutes-to-hours timescales.
